


something you want for yourself

by TolkienGirl



Series: Vintage Winchesters: Season 1 Tags [16]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s01e16 Shadow, Gen, POV Sam Winchester, Psychic Sam Winchester, truck stops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26822458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: He isn’t the same man who told Dean he was leaving this life behind, hours ago in the hotel light. That man is a boy now. All the men that Sam has yet been in his short life have become boys with time.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, John Winchester & Sam Winchester, Meg Masters & Sam Winchester
Series: Vintage Winchesters: Season 1 Tags [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1777720
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	something you want for yourself

They sleep in the car. Sam wouldn’t even call it sleeping so much as, _Dean pulls off at a I-94 truck-stop and they both slump forward, guns curled in their hands as if guns will save them._

_The roar, the howl, the monstrous symphony—here, they’re confined to metal and rubber, bound by diesel power. This is the River Styx between our world and what else is real. The highway has its own horrors, but no one stays for long._

_That makes it bearable._

_You…and me…and Dad. I want us to be together again. I want us to be a family again._

Sam bolts awake. The cuts on his face are shallow, tacky with drying blood, stiff and stinging under butterfly bandages. All they had time for, on the outskirts of Chicago. Dimly, Sam thinks of hospitals, of health insurance. But his drowsiness fades and he remembers the tacit agreement Dean and he reached as a matter of course. These injuries are too peculiar (and survivable) to take that risk.

Sam will just have to pray they don’t scar.

A question flits _there_ , opening him like a flaying knife, dissecting past from present:

 _Why_?

He isn’t the same man who told Dean he was leaving this life behind, hours ago in the hotel light. That man is a boy now. All the men that Sam has yet been in his short life have become boys with time. Split skin and wasted dreams and horrors beyond the imagining of everyone else will do that. Will make your past selves into fools.

This time, it was the knowledge that they were close—that _Dad_ was close—that did it.

Sam yawns, which hurts his neck. He hasn’t had a chance to shower, to scrub Meg’s touch and tongue from his neck, to clean the wounds with more than a sharp dash of antiseptic. He shifts uneasily, smelling sweat and city-grime mingling, and turns his attention to Dean.

Dean is slumped forward, dead at the wheel. His face is yellow in the floodlights of a nearby rig; the blood is black. The stillness of him makes his body seem like carven stone, as clear as one of Sam’s visions.

Dean looks younger when he sleeps, and Sam will never be used to it.

Dean, who loves Dad better than Sam ever can (if perhaps not _more_ ), said,

_He’s stronger without us around._

Jess would be living, without Sam around. Maybe Mom would too. Whatever evil hangs around them, it seems to draw a circle around Sam and Dean and Dad. It has nothing to do with anyone else.

Dean’s latest words draw the circles smaller. Position Dean as a shield for Sam’s danger, and Dad as an arrow flying free, when unencumbered.

Except—Dean doesn’t think like that. Not really. He does his duty and he holds his heart in his chest. Sam is the one with visions.

Sam is the one who is supposed to know what it all means. 


End file.
